Cemetery Road

by Greg Iles

  “Paul saved your life in Iraq. Everybody knows that. Hell, you wrote a book about it. Yet you come back home, and what do you do? You start fucking your best friend’s wife.”

  His words cut right through my meager armor, but I try not to let him see it. “Max, you don’t know what the hell—”

  He stops me with an upraised hand. “Spare us both the indignity of denials. I just shot a nice snap of you two hugging out back. Zoomed in real good. These smartphones are amazing.”

  So the “deer” that I thought Jet saw at the edge of the woods earlier wasn’t a deer at all. It was Max with his camera phone. “Let’s see it.”

  He reaches into his Levi’s and takes out a Samsung Galaxy, then presses a button and holds up the large phone. Though I’m ten feet away, I can see enough to know he’s telling the truth.

  “Hugging’s a long way from sex, Max.”

  He laughs. “You’ve got a point, Goose. But I also watched you fuck her on the patio yesterday. That scene didn’t leave much doubt about penetration.”

  His words drop into my mind like a paralyzing poison.

  “Actually,” he says, “it seemed more vice versa, to tell the truth. You made Jet do all the work. Not much of a farmer, are you? Don’t like plowing?”

  My feet feel nailed to the floor, but my heartbeat’s accelerating like a train gathering speed. As I stare helplessly, Max drags the chair from beneath the table to the corner by the back window. As he sits, the left leg of his jeans rises enough to reveal a black Velcro ankle holster. The burled handle of what looks like a nickel-plated .380 automatic juts from the holster.

  “Keep it copacetic, Marshall,” he says. “Don’t stroke out on me. I could’ve shown Paul that fuck pic yesterday, and I didn’t.”

  “You have pictures from yesterday?”

  “Well, sure. Got a video. It’s a little blurry, but Jet’s clear enough. That hair, you know? And that dark skin. And that miraculous ass. You’re lying flat, so I don’t have your face, but it’s your house behind her, so it must be your cock she’s riding. I’m sure Paul will make that leap pretty quick.”

  We’re dead, I realize, dreading the moment I tell Jet about this meeting. “Did you stop Jet on her way out today?”

  “Nope. Let her strut right out of your woods in blissful ignorance. Dumb and full of come.” Max leans forward, sets his elbows on his knees. “Marshall, I’ve known you since you were a baby. I don’t want you buried out by that statue of your brother. That’d be a downer of an ending.”

  “What do you want, Max?”

  “I’ll tell you in a sec. First, you need to understand the bind I’m in.”

  “I’m listening.”

  He works his tongue around like a man trying to find a pesky sesame seed from his lunch sandwich. “My wife killed herself, son. That’s a plain fact, and a hard one, but I could’ve lived with it. But she also framed me for murder.”

  “Why would Sally do that?”

  He ignores the question. “She painted a target on my back, Goose. A big-ass target.”

  “Why?”

  “She wanted to nail me to the barn wall.”

  “Because you were cheating on her?”

  “Don’t worry about why. That’s between Sally and me.”

  “What do you want from me, Max? Why are you here?”

  “Sally wasn’t content just to frame me, Marshall. She left something behind that would ruin me. And my partners.”

  Something splashes deep in my mind, like a pebble dropped down a well. “What did she leave?”

  “Documents. Files, emails, recordings. Digital stuff. Sally was a hell of a lot sharper than I am about that kind of stuff.”

  An image of Sally’s sapphire pendant rises in my mind, and Jet’s theory of the passwords stuck to the back of it. “What’s in these files, Max?”

  “Business dealings.” He tilts his head forward. “Poker Club business.”

  “Why are you telling me about it?”

  He gives me the smile of a magician pulling a coin from my ear. “Because you’re going to find it for me.”

  “Why would I do that?”

  “Because you’re fucking my daughter-in-law. And if my son finds out, he’ll kill you. You know that better than anybody.”

  I stand mute, knowing I have no choice but to at least pretend to agree to his demands.

  “It won’t be like that time when you were a senior in high school, either,” Max goes on. “Out at the country club? When Paul let you off without an ass-whipping?”

  “How do you know about that?”

  He chuckles. “Not much happens in this town I don’t know about, in the high school or the old folks’ home.”

  This is probably true. “Why do you think I can find this stuff if you can’t?”

  “Because people see you as a crusader, just like Jet. They’ll trust you, confide in you. They’ll think you’re lined up against me, when in fact you’ll be working for me.” Max straightens up in the chair. “So that’s the deal, Goose, plain as I can make it. I need that cache of digital dynamite degaussed and burned in a hot fire. And you’re gonna find it for me.”

  “That’s all you want? Nothing else?”

  “Well . . . there is one other codicil to this contract. Once I have what I need, you’re gonna move back to Washington. You’ve had a good romp with Jet, but you’ve boned that bitch for the last time. You can come back for your father’s funeral, but that’s it. I don’t figure moving back to D.C. will cause you much pain, since you never cared much for your daddy after your brother died.”

  I look at the floor, trying to force my whirling thoughts into some kind of order. All I can see is a blurry path toward survival. “If I agree to find this data cache, you’ll destroy those pictures? And your video? All copies?”

  Max smiles with good humor. “Well . . . I might keep one for myself, to beat off to now and then. Jet looks pretty damn good naked. Especially for her age.”

  This is the Max Matheson I’ve always known, joking about “gettin’ pussy” when he coached us as twelve-year-olds, telling us bloody tales from ’Nam and reveling in all the naïve hero worship that resulted. Max is the first man I heard say, “Old enough to bleed, old enough to butcher.” Knowing that this man has total power over Jet and me—

  “Listen, Goose,” he says, like we’re still on a high school football field. “There’s nothing wrong with tasting whatever you get a craving for, long as you don’t get greedy about it. A slice off a cut loaf’s never missed, right? I think that’s in the Bible.” He laughs heartily. “At least I know a few preachers who think it is. Anyway, I tap quite a few wives around here nice and regular. I like to catch ’em in their late thirties, early forties. That’s the best age. They want it bad, and they know what they’re doing. They’ve finally put to rest whatever hang-ups their mamas stuffed into their heads. Of course this new generation ain’t got no hang-ups at all.”

  Sometimes I wonder whether Max’s sexual obsession is genuine or part of a shtick he uses to distract people. Probably both. “Tell me about this data cache. Why can’t you find it? Where could it be?”

  “If I knew that, would I be here? But I need to find it quick. If I don’t, I’m a dead man. Sooner rather than later.”

  “That doesn’t sound like a negative outcome to me just now.”

  He gives me a wolfish grin. “I bet not. But if I go down, you do, too. Rest assured of that.”

  “Who would kill you, Max? Who would be so brazen?”

  “Any of my more nervous partners. There’s a code in the Poker Club, unwritten but absolutely understood. You never put another member at risk. You never take food from another’s mouth. And you never fuck another man’s wife. That’s in order of priority. If I don’t neutralize this threat to the club, then one of my partners is going to neutralize me. It’s that simple.”

  “If you become a target of your partners, does Jet lose the protection you’ve been giving her for the past
few years?”

  His grin is almost paternal. “You figured that out, huh? What can I say? Jet’s family. She’s not blood, but she’s the mother of my grandson. And he’s a pip, boy. So, the short answer? Nobody fucks with the Matheson family. End of story.”

  “But if you go down, Jet does, too?”

  Max weighs his answer like a gambler calculating odds. “I’d have to say yes, that’s a lock.”

  “Don’t you think you ought to warn her about that?”

  “Nah. Jet’s a survivor, Goose. She doesn’t need to be told something like that. In case you haven’t noticed, she goes cold as an undertaker when she’s looking at a problem. You probably see her through rose-colored glasses. Always have, I guess. But she’s no Pollyanna.”

  He’s right about that, though I don’t like to dwell on it.

  “Max, nobody’s more of a survivor than you. Surely you know more about the crimes of the Poker Club than anyone but Claude Buckman. It would be nothing for you to set up a MAD situation with them.”

  “Mad?” He looks confused for but a moment. “You mean mutual assured destruction?”

  “Exactly. Make your own cache. Let your partners know that if they hurt you, they’ll all end up in prison. If you have to use your cache, you can cut a deal with the prosecutors.”

  He laughs at my apparent naïveté. “That’s a nice idea, Goose. And if my partners were all old-timers like Buckman and Donnelly, I might try it. But you’re forgetting Russo and Cash. Russo’s brother’s a made guy. And Wyatt has six Special Forces operators on his payroll. You don’t threaten guys like that. They’d lock me in a deer freezer on Wyatt’s island and dissect me with a dull pocketknife. I figure it’d take ’em about an hour to find out where I hid whatever cache I’d created. They’ll do the same to whoever Sally left hers with, once they find out who it is.”

  Max’s fear is contagious. “There’s been a rash of break-ins downtown. Lawyers’ offices. And Nadine Sullivan had her shop broken into. They cracked the safe there. Was that you, looking for this data cache Sally made?”

  He’s no longer smiling. “Yeah, that was me. A guy I hired, anyway. But it wasn’t this cache I was looking for. I mean, I didn’t know last night that it existed.”

  That’s one mystery solved, at least partly. “What do you mean? What were you looking for?”

  “Somebody stole a couple of manila envelopes from my office. Dangerous information. I questioned Jet, and it wasn’t her. Sally denied it, too, but something told me it might be her, so I searched the house. Didn’t find anything. Then I made a list of lawyers she might have given the stuff to. I figured she might be planning to divorce me.”

  Now I get it. “Why did you put Nadine on that list?”

  “Because her mother and Sally had been so close.”

  “What would you have done if it turned out Nadine had your stuff?”

  Max’s motionless face tells me all I need to know. “She didn’t,” he says. “Let’s just leave it there.”

  “Well, your guys broke into her house today. How about you put a stop to that? She doesn’t have anything.”

  “Sure, no problem.”

  Max’s willingness to kill over information that could hurt him reminds me that people in the normal world constantly underestimate the danger of poking into matters we don’t understand. You’d think a journalist would have learned that by now. Maybe the fact that I know all the players in this situation is what blinds me to the danger.

  “So you just found out about this cache Sally put together?”

  He nods. “Arthur Pine told me about it this morning, at the jail.”

  “How did Arthur know about it?”

  “Sally called Claude Buckman sometime last night, before killing herself. I don’t understand it, man. She must have hated me at the end. She wanted to destroy me.”

  He’s sticking to the suicide story. “And it’s all Poker Club stuff?”

  “Most of it involves the paper mill deal.”

  “Did you screw Nadine’s mother, Max?”

  He looks amused by the question. “Margaret? Every way you can think of, boy, plus ten more. Her husband ran out on her, so she needed it. She’d got tired of him even before he took off, though. He wasn’t up to her level. Margaret was smart as a whip, just like her daughter. I’d like to hit that once or twice. Just to see if the blood runs true.”

  Seeing my face, Max guffaws, enjoying himself immensely. “Yeah, I saw Nadine drive up here and send Jet running. Where’s she hiding? Back bedroom? Should I pay her a visit? Is she decent? Or is she better than that?”

  I come to my feet at this.

  Max only laughs louder. “Take it easy, Goose. I’m not going back there. But somebody needs to break that girl down like a shotgun. She’s got that buttoned-up librarian thing goin’ on, like Shirley Jones in The Music Man. And I know you ain’t doin’ it justice.”

  I walk over to the island and lean against it. Max is kicked back in my chair like he has all night to shoot the breeze. Right now I’d like to call Jet and tell her to set her Seychelles plan in motion. If it worked, Tommy Russo might put a bullet in Max’s ear by morning. I’m also thinking of the passwords behind Sally’s sapphire pendant. If those are the key to whatever cache Sally put together, then I’d like nothing more than to do exactly what Max has asked me to do—find it.

  “What are you thinking, Goose?” Max asks. “Don’t get tricky on me.”

  Nadine’s request bubbles up to the surface. “Tell me something about your alibi. Who told Sally that you’d slept with Margaret Sullivan?”

  The levity goes out of his face, replaced by the animal cleverness that’s kept him above ground and out of jail all his life.

  “Come on,” I press. “I mean, how many people could have known you were doing Margaret Sullivan?”

  He’s clearly weighing the pros and cons of answering. “Why do you want to know?”

  “What do you care? Unless the whole story’s a lie. Even if it is, I don’t work for the DA. Plus, you own my ass, right?”

  Max nods slowly. “It was Tallulah, our maid. Tallulah Williams.”

  An image of a tall, heavy African American woman comes into my mind. Whenever I spent the night with Paul as a boy, Tallulah was there until after supper and back first thing in the morning.

  “She walked in on Margaret and me one afternoon at my house,” Max explains, “when Sally was out of town.”

  “Tallulah,” I say softly, wondering if he’s lying.

  “Yeah, she’s still kicking, though sometimes I think that old Electrolux will get the best of her.” Max is watching me like a dog that doesn’t trust the human it’s sitting with. “Tell me something, Marshall. Tell me I’m not misjudging you. Tell me you don’t already have this cache of Sally’s. That you’re not planning to print it in your daddy’s newspaper tomorrow. Because that would be a historically bad move, survival-wise.”

  I flash on the photo of Dave Cowart with Buck Ferris that my secret source left me on that Lexar thumb drive. The Poker Club won’t be happy to find that in the Watchman tomorrow—or on our website tonight.

  “If I did have it and I printed it,” I think aloud, “then you’d be dead. Right?” I give him a crocodile smile. “Maybe it’s worth the risk. Once the truth is out, it’s out. Hurting me wouldn’t help you at that point.”

  Max looks deeply disturbed, so much so that it feels like a stranger has taken his place in the chair. “You know, I didn’t want to do this,” he says. “But you’re not leaving me any choice.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “As a general rule, a man can push things pretty far in this life and still make out all right. Hell, I’ve spent my whole life pushing that old envelope. But when you go too far, when you test that outside edge too many times, nature balances things out. You get slung off the road, or you augur in from the clouds. That’s what your daddy did.”

  A dull ringing has started in my ears. “What do you
mean?”

  Max stands and walks to the window, glances out, then looks back at me. “You know your problem? You went up north and turned into a superior son of a bitch. That’s one thing your daddy never was. Duncan could be righteous, but he wasn’t a hypocrite. And he wasn’t smug. Hell, you probably don’t know it, but your father was asked to join the Poker Club back in 1960. My daddy told me that. Duncan declined—he’s the only man who ever did—but nobody held it against him. Because he always cut us plenty of slack in the paper. Oh, he’d go on a tear every now and then, about civic responsibility and maybe even corruption, but he never stung us. Gave us a pass.”

  The anger I feel is so all-consuming I can hardly raise my voice. “I don’t believe you.”

  Max barks a laugh. “Ask him, then! Are you two speaking now?”

  “Get to it, Max.”

  “Duncan’s only problem was when he got the civil rights bug up his butt. Back in the sixties, before I shipped out. Ol’ Duncan wouldn’t let that shit go. He loved him some colored folks. And it made him famous, for a while. The ‘Conscience of Mississippi,’ remember that? But . . . he kinda lost his fire after that car wreck, didn’t he?”

  My anger has leveled off and begun cooling into dread. “Are you saying the Poker Club had something to do with that wreck? With the deaths of his first wife and child?”

  Max smiles strangely. “Did I say that? No. The Poker Club never got involved in nigger trouble. And we sure didn’t whack newspaper publishers.”

  “Then what are you saying?”

  “I’m saying that Duncan was warned by some different boys, and he ignored the warning. And, well, they done what boys like that always did back then.”

  “They caused the wreck?”

  Max turns up his big hands. “One-car accident on Cemetery Road? Come on.”

  “It’s happened before, and since. That’s a bad turn.”

  “Sure it is, if you try to take that dogleg at eighty miles an hour. You think a mama with a baby did that? In the rain? Hell, no.”

  The ringing in my ears has risen in frequency. “They murdered his wife and baby? For what? To punish him?”

  “No, no, they thought it was him in the car. See? Your old man was working late that night, and his wife had brought him some home-cooked food. She left about the time he would have driven home, but Duncan stayed to keep working. In the rain, those old boys couldn’t see it was a woman behind the wheel. They ran her off the road, right down into that gully. Car flipped, and they drowned in the runoff. Three feet of water.”